My friend from El Paso is up at the SJR fishing now. So I decided to check the Fishing Reports. Sadly there is nothing. Remember when this site used to be active? You had people sharing info on what was actually working? Then we had Jude Duran (a previous guide who made a bad decision and got in trouble with law) posting all the time on what was working. We made a point to hire Jude as a guide because even after 20+ yrs of flyfishing, I always learned something new and became a better fisherman.

I know other guides hated people sharing info here. You could actually show up to SJR and catch fish without spending money on a guide. The good guides still had clients and made money. And you could share info on bad guides who crowded you while alone in a good location (because they were poor guides).

Now there is nobody sharing info. There was another website started by another group, but it turned into more of a Facebook page for a small group (get a life) and at times, they were nasty to posters.

Does anyone want to share a little info? Unfortunately, the local shops/guides don't understand that this info used to get people excited about fishing the SJR which brought more business and got people excited about making a trip to the river._________________Tight Lines,
Rob

I agree. I'm not sure why I even come back here to look anymore. There are a couple guide to post in different places. I'm headed up there in a couple days and wish I had some details._________________Keep lookin' up!

Rob and Bob, why don't you start this back up with posting trip reports yourselves? I think lots of forums have just died for lack of interest, and this one is going that way, too. I'm going the 20th and will jump in with what works then.

Posted: Wed May 06, 2015 11:13 am Post subject: San Juan April 27 through May 1

I was on the water all week, fished the Texas Hole, Upper Flats, KP, and Lower Flats. The whole party caught fish daily and we had 4 guide trips
in which one caught a 28"Brown, sad though, we had two rods broken. It
was my first trip and I was very pleased, water averaged 580cfs, and was clear to about 2 feet.

Jerry
Pottsville, AR

ps would put a pic but don't know how
[/img]_________________Jerry McKaughan

Does anyone want to share a little info? Unfortunately, the local shops/guides don't understand that this info used to get people excited about fishing the SJR which brought more business and got people excited about making a trip to the river._________________MALIK66

Greetings all and best wishes for a great fishing season about to begin. I say that because up until now, the river has been a rather quiet place with the water looking strikingly like pea soup as it goes through its annual transformation caused by the turnover in the lake. This began late December and has not really regained the kind of clarity most of us prefer, especially those given to the top water approach to things. That is not necessarily to say it has been unproductive.....I've seen a fair amount of action watching anglers in boats dragging along subsurface fare, but that is not my expertise so best to consult with the shops for bugs and other information pertaining to fishing below the surface.

What I do is look for fish breaking the surface, and those have not been as frequent as I would like and I believe it will be a while yet before the river "turns on...." That said, you can still find areas at certain times of the day when the conditions are right that the fish are looking upward. Monday was such a day, and I was fortunate enough to be "in the right places at the right times".....well, at least some of the time!

Began my day in the Munoz area, what some of us refer to as Baetis Bend, arriving at about 11am. There were very few insects on top but in certain areas I saw fish just beneath the surface taking the occasional adult but mostly feeding on what appeared to be emerging stuff, most likely very tiny midges and some mayflies of the baetis variety that were equally small. This seems to be the trend, smaller and smaller, so if you are going to be successful you will need to adjust your offerings in this direction. I fished a #22 initially but had far greater success when I went down a size to a #24.

From 11am to around 3pm, I found fish feeding in a very localized manner. There was a small pod just below the small island out in the middle of the river on the near side in the riffle and I concentrated on these for an hour or so, catching half a dozen on a midge imitation I tie that was a very dark olive, almost black thread body with a medium CDC wing. Another similar pod had set up shop just upstream in the slack water below the next riffle.....same results and same approach.

I continued walking upstream, just kind of relaxing from a LOT of casting and just enjoying the day on the crik, daydreaming about the times gone by and doing a sort of cerebral exercise contrasting what my memory served up against the reality of the present.....nothing stays the same was my conclusion confirmed by the declining numbers but even more so, the declining size of the fish I had caught. I found a few in the 14-16 inch range, but most were 12-14 inches. This was true the week before up below the dam as well. Running into a old friend, retired firefighter out of CA, I asked him what his observations were in these regards having fished the river for a few decades himself and the answer was the same. We entertained some notions about "where all the big fish" were and looked upstream into the restricted area....hmmm....maybe that's where they are? Who knows, can't go up there any more, off limits, security issues.....seemingly oblivious to the reality that if someone really wanted to blow up the dam they could do so from a car driven up the road that traverses it. A pity, a small quality water stretch made even smaller by such decisions and there seems no reasonable explanation.....might this be reconsidered at some point??? But I digress.

As I walked further upstream toward what most call the lower flats it was getting on towards 3pm.....yeah, I was walking slowly but enjoying the great blue herons, mallards and mud hens, even a wily old bull snake that had me looking really, really carefully at the tail although I have never seen a rattler on this part of the river. Now something interesting was happening as I observed a few "heads" taking what I could still not make out on the top. I had to look downstream, into the western sky and lowering my perspective to near surface level before I saw them.....baetis......very tiny baetis......wow, maybe even a #26 and by no means a "heavy" hatch! Just enough, however, to swing the critical mass pendulum from bottom to top and I spent the next 2 hours quite enjoyably enticing another dozen at least to take my little dry, which was still more of a midge representation but served double-duty as these were some of the smallest BWOs that I have seen. The size of the fish went up slightly to about a 15 inch average but nothing that topped 17 inches. The wind had picked up as well, so casting this really small stuff was not an easy task with 20 inches of 6X tippet and I thought about the 5-weight back in the case at the car that might have served me far better under these conditions than the 2-weight I had in my hand.....next time, lesson learned.

I walked off the crik at 5pm with the wind honking far louder than the geese and figured it had been a good day to be there. I wondered, as well, what an angler might have experienced that day had they not known WHERE to look for the fish? One moral of this story might be, "look and look some more," keep walking until you find what you are there for and don't waste time in places that you don't see feeding fish.

In a nutshell, I concluded that the river needs to clear up a bit more for conditions to approach a more ideal state. Keep in mind that if you are fishing beneath the surface, this may not apply although I did not see large numbers of hookups in the boats drifting by either. The other thing is there were no mosquitos.....good on the one hand, but not so on the other. I have routinely associated these nasty little nuisances with improved fishing on the San Juan spanning my 32 years of hunting trout there.

I hope this account will prove useful to some, as PA Angler aptly notes, coming from afar and wondering what is going on here although admittedly slanted towards the dry fly (pun intended :-) persuasion. Have some fun, enjoy your stay, catch some fish.....and please don't mistake my buddy for his venomous cousin, we need all of his variety we can get!

Tight lines and be safe....some of the terrain is snotty slick due to recent rains and a slip in the wrong spot will not end well, nor perhaps dry!

Thanks for the report, Dry Fly. always good to hear from an old regular. I wish I were as good with the DF as you, but have to resort to going deeper. I wonder if you ever got as far as Lower Flats? I talked to a guide the other day who said fishing was really good there, but didn't mention if the fish were bigger. Hope it keeps up, as LF is one of my favorite places, and hasn't fished very well the last few years. I think it all boils down to where they stocked the last - a guy camped next to us said they put 20,000 in up by Cable hole last week, so maybe you're seeing the smaller guys grabbing it away from the biggies? I've never seen the fare dialed in to one fly so much as now, with the red and orange annelids almost a must subsurface.
Do you notice the fewer people? Or is it because the weather's bad? Only 5 people in the Cable hole area this morning. Last Thursday we were the only folks in T. Hole for quite a while, and only one other downstream to Biscuit Rock. Everyone is raving about how good the fishing is right now. All they need is that annelid, with an emerger of some sort as your second fly.